Gravitational wave critics respond in turn (1)

Michael Brooks's recent article on reports of gravitational wave detection (3 November, p 28) and a response from the LIGO and Virgo teams (Letters, 24 November) raise a number of interesting questions.

If, as Brooks reports, the “residuals” for the event labelled GW150914 were published for the sole purpose of illustration, what are the correct data sets and why has LIGO not made them public? If LIGO believes that our analysis of correlations between residual noise at different detectors is incorrect, why have they not stated clearly where we have made a mistake? And if our calculations are correct, why does LIGO consider this statistically significant 80 per cent correlation irrelevant for the interpretation of the observed signal?

Despite LIGO's claims of openness, we have been unable to identify members of the collaboration who can speak authoritatively and officially on LIGO's behalf on matters of data analysis. We believe it would be useful for LIGO to identify some individual or a group of scientists to represent it with the aim of resolving these differences of interpretation in an appropriately professional manner.